Doctortayria's Blog

My 60th began just a few minutes ago. I had been thinking to write a personal note to my Mother to say “Thanks Mom for what you did for me 60 years ago today”, but decided possibly others might appreciate the sentiments as well.

For every single day of 6 decades I have had the alive presence of MOTHER in my life, something that every human yearns for, but which many sadly experience as absence more than presence – physically or emotionally. I have had good fortune, great blessing in this regard. My mother has been committed to her role with her complete heart and being. In the worst time of my life, she was there for me like a rock, she would not let me drown. Every day I know I am supported and unconditionally loved, and that my joys truly mean joy to someone else, and my even my tiniest discomforts are cared about. What more can a human being want? Truly, what greater gift is there?

I want to take this occasion to thank my Mom, Kathryn Whitlow, and to share in her honor this delightful poem, a favorite of mine by Billy Collins.

The Lanyard – Billy Collins

Today my friend and I went by a stream to make a spring ritual, say prayers, let go of the old and dying, open ourselves to the resurgent life of spring, wash each others’ feet in the waters, baptize ourselves and each other with the water of newly enspirited life. Ah spring. Lying on our backs on a rock as the spring bubbled around us we looked up at the trees with leaves just beginning to push into life. In another week the thin, tender growth will be full. As summer moves in, thickness and density take over. I could feel the same life cycle bursting through our cells.

As these themes of death and resurrected life are also honored on the Christian calendar this week at Easter, and Earth day is tomorrow, I offer these gorgeous lines of Rainer Maria Rilke from his Ninth Duino Elegy:

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
There’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love
I want that too. Believe me,
no more of your springimes are needed
to win me over – even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and I know I can trust
the death you will bring.

My windows are open and the birds are back – singing, singing, singing. AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH. What greater miracle? Resurrection is real.

The world, the way we have set it up in the last centuries, has a way of sucking up time, space, tasks, energy commitments so that what and who we love become marginalized, put on a back burner, saved for later. For what cause? There is the question. For what cause.

Whatever the cause, the evidence of it piles up. I’ve sorted it into baskets, lists, folders, areas for accumulation that try to be visible enough not to disappear, but neat enough not to look like untended messes (which they are). They threaten sanity. Today, with all of this glaring at me, and a week ahead that stares me down, what my heart loves has reached out to me taking over my time. I let it. I succumbed. I care.

On the world news tonight I saw a half hour version of the unthinkable – tornadoes, radiation, oil spills, deaths, ruined lives, record breaking disasters. In the midst of all of this effort to bring to public awareness the stories exploding all over our precious Spaceship Earth is a tenor I listen for, and only it keeps me going. Love is the only reason anyone cares to bring the stories, tune into the stories, to record people sorting through the chaos, crying over the photos of grandmothers, raising flags to grandfathers, showing faces of animals rescued.

What is in the macrocosm is in the microcosm, and vice versa. I see in my little life the devastation, radiation, debris at so many levels – and please hear me – that is not to diminish the horrors by comparison to my privileged little life without physical hunger. But what I know to focus upon here, in the microcosm, is love. To put my ear to the ground and listen to its footsteps, understand that vibration. Give that attention and energy. Follow it.

That is what we can do in the macrocosm, on Spaceship Earth, too. Listen to the love. Let its tones rise above the others. Feed it. Cry with it. Believe in its power. Focus there. Give energy there. Let the other rhythms, like ignoring the coughing at the symphony, subside. Listen for music of love; support, feed and follow it.

I got hooked on watching American Idol when my adorable, and actually quite discerning, youngest daughter Arlene convinced me to watch it. At first I had too hard a time with Simon Cowell. It was difficult to get past the sense of what felt like cruelty that hurt my heart too much. But, I did get past that to enjoy the experience of watching these kids coming from anywhere and nowhere to sing their hearts out, looking for a break. So, unashamedly, I have watched this show faithfully and with great interest since Season 2. I am not sure at this point how many years that has been, but several.

I can say from my perspective, and from what I think I am hearing in a broader light, that this year the talent is at another level altogether. I feel like writing about this not so much to express my personal satisfaction, but because of something I feel emerging from the field of our collective psyche that tonight I am excited about. The kids that are showcased this year are eclectic – very. Deep traditions of music are represented which the young artists seem to be students of at the level of something pure and profound in them, way beyond the need for attention or popularity. The music calls to them, and they express it with jaw-dropping soulfulness and talent. I am watch with awe and true respect.

In terms of my own training and passion for dialogue, a method I learned and have taught developed by physicist David Bohm that assists the human mind in listening to, opening to and respecting very differing points of view, I felt tonight while watching American Idol that the whole nation, the listening audience is taking a huge step toward dialogue. From deep in our collective soul emerge these voices – from jazz, heavy metal, country, folk, rock, gospel, blues – children with these backgrounds IN them, expressing them as though their lives depended upon them. These do not, to me, seem to be kids crying out for a career, but kids determined to give voice to what is moving in them. They are not a monochromatic expression of American taste, but of a stirringly diverse and powerfully rooted communication.

I am not eloquent enough to say what music is, does and says that surpasses every other language, but I feel it and know it. Tonight I am sincerely moved by what I witness emergent in this release of beauty that I feel is an eclectic, diverse and guileless thread in our national soul, delivered by these young people in a popular medium that is considered way too commercial to be soulful. I choose to believe that people are drawn to watch this more because of a sincere hunger for what music provides, and these talents express, than for other reasons.

The name for my retreat center, Bridging Worlds, came to me after a dream, one of the several very compelling ones that convinced me to take the leap and move from Los Angeles to the remote and ancient mountains of North Carolina. In this dream I was driving my car and it died, wouldn’t move another inch. I got out, and looked across a distance to my home in the woods. There was a bridge between me and it. (At the time of this dream I had no notion of living anywhere other than where I was living, in urban Southern California.) I began to walk across the bridge in my dream. Someone joined me, then another, then another, then another… and on it went. We became many, a mass of people. We all spontaneously burst into song and dance as we crossed the bridge, singing a really happy song, doing exuberant movements, everyone in unison.

After a series of events which led me to encounter my home in the mountains, while contemplating the audacity of moving from LA to live alone in such a remote spot, this dream came to my remembrance and I felt without a doubt that it had been prophetic. Because of the bridge image in the dream, and a couple of other incidents involving a bridge, the name for my center emerged.

Now I am going to bed in my new part-time home in town. After nearly 7 years of living alone in that home in the woods on a mountain top, I have come down from the mountain to discover what my call is here, bridging the mountain world with this one. I feel one, two, three and a few more persons singing and dancing with me. How prophetic will the dream turn out to be I wonder? Does it suggest a chorus of internal, angelic voices singing with me as I move across this bridge, or will it be more literal, will more people involved? This is yet to be discovered.

I keep following the breadcrumbs in the forest – dreams, synchronicities, delights, love, depths of connection, visions, wisdom offered, healing, friendships of the heart, an occasional fairy and goddesses who present. What else is there to do?

Carl Jung referred to man’s evolutionary journey from unconsciousness to consciousness as a project. I am feeling the import of that meaning especially recently. A project is something you work at, a major undertaking, requiring effort and planning. It does not come by non-effort and non-doing, but rather by focus, commitment, intention, will and motivation. Consciousness is not a given, it is something we give to ourselves and the world.

I have recently completed a detox, and as things go, the effort continues in surprising ways. Nature is so much more conscious than we humans are, and I am trying to catch up with her. The way she planned it, I did this physical detox and then soon after, even during, she brought in a whole life transition. I am moving into town part-time and putting my house up for rent. To seriously rent my home means to clear out (detox) closets and drawers in the space that will be rented. This means that boxes of things I stored in some of the closets when I moved here, almost SEVEN YEARS AGO, must be opened! Back then I was starting a new life and, without really intending to, burying the hard-to-face lost parts of the old one, mostly the memories of a happy family that had once been.

There was a lot of unconsciousness set into the patterns of that life, cultural, familial, religious, archetypal. We in the family were all doing the best we could to live up to our roles, until the drive toward consciousness made it unsustainable on all counts.

During the detox I was increasingly aware that being conscious of what I was doing in that project was hard! I wanted to just go for that habit that supported staying below the level of consciousness. I could even hear myself saying “I just want to go unconscious!” not only regarding the food intake but with other issues that nature threw at me during that period. I heard myself with love, pity, marvel, intrigue, fascination, worry and joy.

Now, unpacking the boxes in the closets has stirred up a miniature crisis. (Since I don’t live in Japan, every crisis right now seems miniature.) Out come huge memories of a different life and identity, a then hoped for and imagined possibility, ideas of what was supposed to be vs. what actually was meant to be that apparently still aren’t fully resolved. My body/psyche/mind/spirit wants to go unconscious so desperately that it is anesthetizing me, putting me in a semi-comatose state.

But, I love the project of consciousness. I am committed. I know the whole world depends upon each of us doing the best we can with it, each in our own way. Jung stated his belief that the future of the world is hanging on one thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man. Whatever the individual can do in our particular way to beef up that thread into a strand, a string, a rope, a strong cord, on and on, I am in love with.

It is a project. It takes every day getting up and being committed and in love with it. The present is pregnant with gorgeous, deeply longed for possibility. Clearing and detoxifying the by-products (shit) of what has been once the nourishment of that has been assimilated, prepares the womb of the present to give healthy birth.